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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Come On, President Obama, the climate bill is deeply flawed

CREDO BLOG

June 29, 2009 10:36 AM

Come On, President Obama

Friday afternoon the House passed, quite narrowly, a deeply flawed climate change bill. This weekend, Mr. Obama, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the legislation even though it gutted many provisions on which he campaigned in an effort to woo coal legislators, had only a single complaints - that the legislation imposes a tariff, in 2020, on countries who are without a system for limiting CO2 emissions.

That is it? I have to say that this bodes very badly for improving the House bill as climate change legislation is considered in the Senate. If the public does not know what needs to be improved, it will only be weakened further.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Establishment view of Obama's civil liberties record

salon.com

Glenn Greenwald

Monday June 29, 2009 07:30 EDT

Establishment view of Obama's civil liberties record

One of the most cherished weapons for dismissing political arguments without having to engage them is to claim they come from "the Far Left" or are confined to "liberal ideologues." For years, that was what was said about withdrawing from Iraq even as majorities of Americans supported that position, and it is how the political and media establishment now demonize the call for investigations into Bush/Cheney crimes, despite large percentages and diverse ideological support for those views . Exactly the same tactic is used to dismiss those who criticize Obama for adopting Bush policies in the areas of civil liberties and secrecy: only people from the Far Left fringe or civil liberties extremists would equate Obama and Bush when it comes to such matters.

From today's Op-Ed page of The Washington Post -- the ultimate establishment organ -- one finds this observation about Obama's use of the state secrets privilege from a Post Editorial:

The second Bush administration took the state secrets doctrine to new heights by arguing that an entire case should be dismissed -- sometimes at its earliest stages -- if it could touch on any information that could conceivably have national security ramifications. The Justice Department under President George W. Bush used this approach to try to quash litigation involving, among other things, domestic surveillance and extraordinary rendition (the forced transfer of detainees to countries where they may be tortured).

President Obama has said that the state secrets doctrine should be reformed, and he has promised to be more measured. Yet when confronted with actual cases the Obama Justice Department has adopted the same legal arguments as the Bush administration.

From a Post Op-Ed today by two of the leading advocates of preventive detention -- former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith and Benjamim Wittes of the right-wing Hoover Institute and neoconservative Brookings Institution -- there is this observation on Obama's possible use of an Executive Order to vest himself with preventive detention powers rather than having Congress do it for him:

Obama, to put it bluntly, seems poised for a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration's unilateral approach to detention. The attraction is simple, seductive and familiar. The legal arguments for unilateralism are strong in theory; past presidents in shorter, traditional wars did not seek specific congressional input on detention. Securing such input for our current war, it turns out, is still hard. The unilateral approach, by contrast, lets the president define the rules in ways that are convenient for him and then dares the courts to say no.

This seductive logic, however, failed disastrously for Bush -- and it will not serve Obama any better.

That Obama is replicating the Bush/Cheney approach in these areas isn't a by-product of some civil liberties extremist refusal to appreciate the joys of pragmatism or Leftist-purist dissatisfaction with all dogmatic imperfection. That this observation is heard from The Washington Post Editorial Page (of all places), from right-wing advocates such as Wittes and Goldsmith, and from mainstream, liberal and pro-Obama outlets (TPM this weekend: preventive detention approach is "the latest installment in the Obama administration's tendency to mimic the Bushies on war on terror tactics") demonstrates that rather conclusively. Rather, it's just a blindlingly clear fact that any minimally honest person is compelled to acknowledge. When one combines that with the fact that Bush's actions in the areas of civil liberties, Terrorism and secrecy were (at least ostensibly) central to the widespread anger about the Bush presidency, it's impossible to understand how anyone whose objections over the last eight years were sincere (as opposed to a handy weapon opportunistically used to politically weaken Bush) could be supporting what Obama, in these areas, is doing now.

* * * * *

One last related point: Ever since Obama reversed himself on the question of whether to suppress the torture photos, I've been searching for an Obama supporter who (a) defends his decision to suppress those photos but also (b) criticized him when, two weeks earlier, he announced that he would release those photos. I haven't found such a person yet, but I'm still looking.

When Obama originally announced he would release the photos, he was attacked on seemingly every television news show by people like Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney and Joe Lieberman for endangering the Troops, but I don't know of a single Democrats who joined in with those criticisms on the ground that the photos shouldn't be released. But as soon as Obama changed his mind and embraced the Graham/Cheney/Lieberman position, up rose hordes of Obama supporters suddely insisting that those photos must be suppressed because to release them would be to endanger the Troops. I'm still searching for any pro-photo-suppression Democrats who criticized Obama when he triggered controversy by orginally announcing he would release them.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Obama Courts Disaster With New Detention Plan


THE NATION

Obama Courts Disaster With New Detention Plan

posted by Ari Melber on 06/26/2009 @ 6:54pm

The Obama administration is rushing towards a unilateral plan to imprison people without trial, according to a huge, new joint article from the Washington Post and ProPublica. The proposal would completely cut Congress out of the process by using an executive order to essentially bring Gitmo stateside:

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations. Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

That is a terrible idea. For its part, the White House dispatched aides to push back. From the article:

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House was already trying to build support.

After publication, another Obama official issued an odd denial to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder:

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, flatly denied the report to me. "There is no executive order. There just isn't one." (emphasis added)

First, there is no legitimate reason for a government official to claim anonymity here. It simply echoes the official line from the article, which is likely to be Robert Gibbs' line when reporters press the issue in Monday's briefing.

Second, the response is a classic dodge -- there is no executive order now, and no decision has been made. Of course, the article is not reporting that an order has already been issued. The news is that Obama officials are preparing to advance President Bush's Gitmo detention regime through a unilateral executive order soon, cutting out Congress, and thus any democratic accountability, while extending a controversial, unpopular policy.

Even though Obama's National Archives speech asserted the importance of working with other branches of government. ("We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded," he said, "They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.")

Even though the Bush administration already tried this unilateral tack, only to have its system invalidated by the Supreme Court precisely because Congress was shut out. (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.)

And even though decades of legal precedent show, as Professor/President Obama knows, that the executive branch operates at the nadir of its constitutional power when acting without the cooperation of Congress, even in the national security arena. (A point most famously established for President Truman in the Youngstown case.)

Obama's argument for preventive detention "violates basic American values and is likely unconstitutional," warned Sen. Russ Feingold in a recent letter to the President, cautioning that detention without trial "is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world." Advancing such a controversial precedent on American soil, without the participation of Congress or the American people, would be disastrous.

UPDATE: The AP reports that two administration officials said Obama is considering an executive order for preventive detention. The article includes responses from the ACLU and CCR, two human rights organizations that have battled the Bush and Obama administrations:

Christopher Anders, [from] the American Civil Liberties Union Washington office, says the organization strongly opposes any plans for indefinite detention of prisoners."We're saying it shouldn't be done at all," he said Friday.... Civil rights advocates and constitutional scholars accused Obama of parroting [Bush's] detention policies. "Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the president promised to shut down,' Shayana Kadidal, a senior attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement Friday, [adding,] "If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that executive overreach, left to continue unchecked for many years, has a tendency to harden into precedent."

Time to End False Bipartisanship


Time to End False Bipartisanship

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

God I hope David Broder is wrong. "The President has told visitors," the Washington Post columnist wrote last week, "that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes 52-48." The good news is that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is now talking about how bipartisanship may need to be redefined downward if the Democrats are going to pass meaningful healthcare reform. In a meeting with journalists last week, Emanuel proposed that health-care legislation could be bipartisan without Republican votes. "There will be ideas from both parties, and individuals from both parties, in the final product," he said. "Whether the Republicans decide to vote for things they promoted will be up to them." ( David Axelrod seconded the emotion in his appearance on ABC's "This Week.")

The trick now is to ensure that "centrist" Democrats (who, as Paul Krugman notes, "are in fact way out in right field") pay more attention to the broad majority favoring a strong public option than to the wads of dough lavished on them by big Pharma and insurance lobbyists. As Joe Conason put it in his invaluable New York Observer column, "If Congress fails to enact healthcare reform this year---or it enacts a sham reform designed to bail out corporate medicine while excluding the 'public option'---then the public will rightly blame Democrats, who have no excuse for failure except their own cowardice and corruption." Blame could well be registered in ugly midterm election results in 2010.

It's time to part ways with obstructionist Republicans and pass a strong healthcare bill with a majority vote, which is possible if efforts cease to get a handful of Republicans to cross over. Redefining bipartisanship at a time when the GOP has become a male, pale and stale party committed to deficit demagoguery and fearmongering is the common sense and, I'd even argue, pragmatic course. Instead of wasting time on recalcitrant GOP holdouts, do what Drew Westen, author of the terrific book "The Political Brain," advises to pass meaningful healthcare change: "Focus on principles, tell compelling stories, move people emotionally and send clear messages."

Sure, there are legitimate issues raised by people I admire about the value of a public plan. Even President Obama once said, "If I were designing a system from scratch, then I'd probably set up single-payer." Like 59% of the Americans surveyed in January 2009 by CBS News and the New York Times, I would prefer, as would my colleagues at The Nation, to see Congress respond to this country's healthcare crisis by scrapping a failed-for-profit system and replacing it with a comprehensive national health insurance program.

But for now, the calculus of political viability has taken single-payer off the table. That doesn't mean we cease fighting to get it back on --but it probably means we need to balance our short and longterm goals. Let's assume some compromise in our political system is inevitable. The hard question is whether the compromise opens the door to greater progress or forecloses opportunity. A weak public plan will make it harder to get healthcare expenses under control while extending care to all. A weak plan may discredit healthcare reform for a generation. Real reform will cement strong attachment to the party which has shown it can pass legislation truly improving the condition of people's lives. (That's a key reason why former Dan Quayle adviser and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol fought tooth and nail to derail Clinton's healthcare reforms.) And for all the wrongheaded deficit anxiety circulating, do Democrats really think that if they pass major health care reform, and increase access--that voters will punish them for growing the deficit? (And the cost debate is forcing to the fore much-needed consideration of changes to our dysfunctional and unjust tax structure that will enable us to pay for these healthcare reforms.)

Congress is, of course, usually pretty skittish about reform, but with a President with high approval ratings and an historically unpopular GOP--if this isn't a time to pass sweeping reform with a strong public plan, then when is?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.

Obama, They Want You to Fail. We do not.


Obama, They Want You to Fail

by Robert Parry

After last year's elections, a Democratic operative told me that if the Democrats got to 59 seats in the Senate, it would be easy to peel off one or two Republicans to pass key legislation like serious health care reform. I was left wondering what political planet he'd been living on for the past three decades.

For almost as long as I've been in Washington (I arrived for the Associated Press in 1977) it has worked the other way. Even when the Republicans appear to be on the defensive and outnumbered, they band together and vote as a bloc, while Democrats bend over backwards to be "bipartisan."

This dynamic has continued into Barack Obama's presidency as he and the Democrats have watered down their proposals with the hope of winning over a few Republican votes so they can claim they achieved some bipartisanship, even if it means passing bills that are half-hearted half-measures.

That process dominated the debate over the $787 billion stimulus bill that the Democrats diluted with Republican tax cuts and shrank in size despite warnings from top economists that the package would fall far short of the needed boost in jobs, a bleak prediction that now appears to be coming true as unemployment climbs toward 10 percent.

In exchange for the weaker stimulus bill, the Democrats got three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House. (The Republicans then drove one of those GOP senators, Arlen Specter, out of the party, though Specter still won't count himself as a reliable Democratic vote.)

The pattern of belligerent Republicans and timid Democrats is now repeating itself on health-care reform. Democrats first excluded from the debate the one measure that probably could save significant money - a single-payer system - and they now appear poised to trade away Obama's proposal for a "public option" to possibly garner a couple of Republican votes.

Though enacting a public option is favored by nearly three-quarters of the American people - and has the potential of at least saving some money by pressuring private insurers to rein in costs - Democrats are so entranced by the siren song of bipartisanship that they appear on the verge of scuttling it.

In doing so, the Democrats could well recreate the worst mistake of Hillary Clinton's failed health insurance plan of 1994. The fundamental flaw in her complex scheme was that it tried so hard not to harm the insurance industry that it wasn't clear how it would make matters any better - and the industry still torpedoed it with a misleading public relations campaign.

Today, the Obama administration and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus have been so proud of getting all the players to sit down at the table (with the exception of single-payer advocates who were excluded) that they have lost track of the hard reality that if the nation is really going to address its health care crisis, there will have to be some financial losers.

Right now, the losers are the tens of millions of uninsured and under-insured Americans, the doctors and nurses who are appalled at the cruelty of the U.S. medical system, and the U.S. businesses that pay for their employees' health insurance and thus are put at an economic disadvantage to their foreign competitors operating in countries that have single-payer systems.

Helping the Industry

For the status quo to change significantly, the private health insurance companies and other parts of the medical industrial complex must be compelled to extract savings from their bureaucratic waste and excess profits. To do that would require, at minimum, a robust "public option" that forces a revamping of the private health insurance business model.

Not surprisingly, the health insurance industry doesn't want to undergo such a transformation, so its lobbyists have leaned on the Republicans and a handful of "centrist" Democrats to either kill the "public option" or in Baucus's phrase "sculpt" it into something that doesn't threaten the industry.

That's where Sen. Kent Conrad's scheme of setting up "cooperatives" comes in. The North Dakota Democrat has proposed building from scratch a network of non-profit "cooperatives" that would lack both the size for administrative savings and the bargaining power to negotiate lower prices.

While a public option could piggyback on the Medicare bureaucracy to maximize savings and have the advantage of simplicity, the emerging Baucus-Conrad scheme would add an array of cooperatives to the already confusing mix of insurance plans. For many Americans, these new entities won't present an appealing alternative to private insurance.

If such a "compromise" emerges, a few Republicans might vote yes; the industry would be happy; and the Obama administration could have a "bipartisan" signing ceremony.

But the American people might find themselves left out of the celebration. The federal government might even compel the uninsured - under penalty of fines - to sign up with an existing insurance company whether they feel they can afford it or not. Mandated coverage could mean a big windfall for the insurance industry, pushing nearly 50 million new customers into its arms.

Eventually, however, the reality would sink in that very little had improved. Millions of Americans would understand that Washington protected the interests of a cold-hearted industry rather than fashion a health-insurance plan that would do the people much good. With that realization, many Americans would blame Obama and the Democrats.

On the other hand, if Obama demanded a public option and insisted on the support of his party, the dynamic might go very differently. If the Democrats assembled 59 votes for a strong plan - even if Republicans continue their obstruction of Al Franken's Senate election in Minnesota - that could turn the tables on "centrist" Republicans who would have to decide which side to take.

To get the Democrats to behave in such a disciplined and serious fashion, however, might require a backbone or brain transplant for many of them. But it's way past time for the Democrats to recognize that their obsession with bipartisanship is unrequited.

The Republicans have a very different agenda. Indeed, with the continuing pratfalls of their supposedly top-tier candidates - like South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine holiday with his mistress - they have only one genuine hope for the future of their party: President Obama must fail and the Democrats must take the blame.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

OBAMA'S USED GREEN TEAM OF NO CHANGE


counterpunch

Meet the Retreads

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Of all of Barack Obama’s airy platitudes about change none were more vaporous than his platitudes about the environment and within that category Obama has had little at all to say about matters concerning public lands and endangered species. He is, it seems, letting his bureaucratic appointments do his talking for him. So now, five months into his administration, Obama’s policy on natural resources is beginning to take shape. It is a disturbingly familiar shape, almost sinister.

It all started with the man in the hat, Ken Salazar, Obama’s odd pick to head the Department of Interior. Odd because Salazar was largely detested in his own state, Colorado, by environmentalists for his repellent coziness with oil barons, the big ranchers and the water hogs. Odd because Salazar was close friends with the disgraced Alberto Gonzalez, the torturer’s consigliere. Odd because Salazar backed many of the Bush administration’s most rapacious assaults on the environment and environmental laws. Odder still because Salazar, in his new position as guardian of endangered species, had as a senator repeatedly advocated the weakening of the Endangered Species Act.

Salazar never hid his noxious positions behind a green mantle. Obama certainly knew what he was buying. And the president could have made a much different and refreshing choice by picking Rep. Raul Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat, a Hispanic, a westerner and a true environmentalist who had helped to expose the cauldron of corruption inside the Bush Interior Department. Yes, Obama could have picked a western environmentalist; instead he tapped a prototypical western politician with deep ties to the water, oil, timber, ranching and mining industries. So the choice was deliberate and it presaged the deflating policies that are now beginning to stream out of his office, from siding with Sarah Palin against the polar bear to greenlighting dozens of Bush-era mountaintop removal mining operations across Appalachia. (As CounterPunch pointed out last fall, Obama and Palin have long since established symbiotic harmony on God’s Pipeline, the proposed $30 billion natural gas pipeline that, if constructed, will slice across the tundra and boreal forests from Prudhoe Bay through Canada to Chicago.)

Salazar wasted no time in turning the Interior Department office into a hive of his homeboys. This group of lawyers and former colleagues have already earned the nickname the Colorado Mafia, Version Three. It’s Version Three because Colorado Mafia Version One belonged to James Watt and his Loot-the-West zealots from the Mountain States Legal Fund. The Version Two update came in the form of Gale Norton and her own band of fanatics, some of whom remain embedded in the Department’s HQ, just down the hall from Salazar’s office.

Beyond a perverse obsession with Stetson hats, Salazar and Watt share some eerie resemblances. For starters, they look alike. There’s a certain fleshy smugness to their facial features. Who knows if Salazar shares Watt’s apocalyptic eschatology (Why save nature, Watt once quipped, when the end of the world is nigh.), but both men are arrogant, my-way-or-the-highway types. Watt’s insolent demeanor put him to the right even of his patron Ronald Reagan and ultimately proved his downfall. Salazar may well meet the same fate—if Obama, knock-on-wood, doesn’t nominate him for the next Supreme Court vacancy first. Most troubling, however, is the fact that both Watt and Salazar hold similar views on the purpose of the public estate, treating the national forests and Bureau of Land Management lands not as ecosystems but as living warehouses for the manufacture of stuff: lumber, paper, wedding rings, meat, energy.

With this stark profile in mind, it probably comes as no big shock that the man Salazar nominated to head the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with protecting native wildlife and enforcing the Endangered Species Act, has viewed those responsibilities with indifference if not hostility. For the past twelve years, Sam Hamilton, whose nomination to head the agency is now pending before congress, has run the Southeast Region of the Fish and Wildlife Service, a swath of the country that has the dubious distinction of driving more species of wildlife to the brink of extinction than any other.

From Florida to Louisiana, the encroaching threats on native wildlife are manifest and relentless: chemical pollution, oil drilling, coastal development, clearcutting, wetland destruction and a political animus toward environmental laws (and environmentalists). And Sam Hamilton was not one to stand up against this grim state of affairs.

A detailed examination of Hamilton’s tenure by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility reveals his bleak record. During the period from 2004 through 2006, Hamilton’s office performed 5,974 consultations on development projects (clearcuts, oil wells, golf courses, roads, housing developments and the like) in endangered species habitat. But Hamilton gave the green light to all of these projects, except one. By contrast, during the same period the Rocky Mountain Office of the Fish and Wildlife Service officially consulted on 586 planned projects and issued 100 objections or so-called jeopardy opinions. Hamilton has by far the weakest record of any of his colleagues on endangered species protection.

There’s plenty of evidence to show that Hamilton routinely placed political considerations ahead of enforcing the wildlife protection laws. For example, in the agency’s Vero Beach, Florida office Fish and Wildlife Service biologists wrote a joint letter in 2005 complaining that their supervisors had ordered them not to object to any project in endangered species habitat—no matter how ruinous.

Take the case of the highly endangered Florida panther. One of Hamilton’s top lieutenants in Florida has been quoted as telling his subordinates that the big cat was a “zoo species” doomed to extinction and that to halt any developments projects in the panther’s habitat would be a waste of time and political capital.

“Under Sam Hamilton, the Endangered Species Act has become a dead letter,” says PEER’s Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that the White House announcement on Hamilton touted his “innovative conservation” work. “Apparently, the word ‘no’ is not part of ‘innovative’ in Mr. Hamilton’s lexicon. To end the cycle of Endangered Species Act lawsuits, the Fish and Wildlife Service needs a director who is willing to follow the law and actually implement the Act. Hamilton’s record suggests that he will extend the policies of Bush era rather than bring needed change.”

Now this man has the fate of the jaguar, grizzly and northern spotted owl in his compromised hands. Feel the chill?

Over at the Agriculture Department Obama made a similarly cynical pick when he chose former Iowa governor Tom Vilsak to head the agency that oversees the national forests. Vilsak resides to the right of Salazar and not just in the sitting arrangement at Cabinet meetings. He is a post-Harken Iowa Democrat, which means he’s essentially a Republican who believes in evolution six days a week. (He leaves such Midwestern heresies at the door on Sundays.) Think Earl Butz—minus the racist sense of humor (as far as we know).

Vilsak is a creature of industrial agriculture, a brusque advocate for the corporate titans that have laid waste the farmbelt: Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. As administrations come and go, these companies only tighten their stranglehold, poisoning the prairies, spreading their clones and frankencrops, sucking up the Oglalla aquifer, scalping topsoil and driving the small farmers under. It could have been different. Obama might have opted for change by selecting Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, food historian Michael Pollan or Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union. Instead he opted for the old guard, a man with a test tube in one hand and Stihl chainsaw in the other.

Through a quirk of bureaucratic categorization, the Department of Agriculture is also in charge of the national forests. At 190 million acres, the national forests constitute the largest block of public lands and serve as the principal reservoir of biotic diversity and wilderness on the continent. They have also been under a near constant state of siege since the Reagan era: from clearcuts, mining operations, ORV morons, ski resorts and cattle and sheep grazing.

Since 1910, when public outrage erupted after President William Taft fired Gifford Pinchot for speaking out against the corrupt policies of Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, the chief of the Forest Service had been treated as a civil service employee and, much like the director of the FBI and CIA, was considered immune from changes in presidential administrations. This all changed when Bill Clinton imperiously dismissed Dale Robertson as chief in 1994 and replaced him with Jack Ward Thomas, the former wildlife biologist who drafted Clinton’s plan to resume logging in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Thomas’ tenure at the agency proved disastrous for the environment. In eight years of Clinton time, the Forest Service cut six times as much timber as the agency did under the Reagan and Bush I administrations combined. The pace of logging set by Thomas continued unabated during the Bush the Younger’s administration.

So now Vilsak has given the boot to Gail Kimbell, Bush’s compliant chief, and replaced her with a 32-year veteran of the agency named Tom Tidwell. Those were 32 of the darkest years in the Forest Service's long history, years darkened by a perpetual blizzard of sawdust. You will search Google in vain for any evidence that during the forest-banging years of the Bush administration, when Tidwell served as Regional Forester for the Northern Rockies, this man ever once stood up to Kimbell or her puppetmaster Mark Rey, who went from being the timber industry’s top lobbyist to Bush’s Undersecretary of Agriculture in charge of the national forests. (Point of interest: Rey, once known as the Skeletor of the Timber Industry for the hundreds of thousands of acres of clearcuts on his rapsheet, has now been retained as a fixer by WildLaw, an environmental law firm in Alabama -- retained without ever having issued a single mea culpa for his career as a top rank ecocider. You just can’t make this stuff up, anymore.) No, Tidwell was no whistleblower. He was, in fact, a facilitator of forest destruction, eagerly implementing the Kimbell-Rey agenda to push clearcuts, mines, oil wells and roads into the heart of the big wild of Montana and Idaho.

Despite this dismal resumé, Tidwell’s appointment received near unanimous plaudits, from timber companies, ORV user groups, mining firms and, yes, the Wilderness Society. Here’s the assessment of Cliff Roady director the Montana Forest Products Association, a timber industry lobby outfit: “His appointment keeps things on a fairly steady course. He reported to Gail Kimbell, and they worked together really well. He’s somebody we’d look forward to working with.”

And here, singing harmony, are the tweets of Bob Eckey, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society, which some seasoned observers of environmental politics consider to be yet another timber industry lobby group: “Tidwell understands the American public’s vision for a national forest has been changing.”

During his tenure in Montana, Tidwell specialized in the art of coercive collaboration, a social manipulation technique that involves getting environmental groups to endorse destructive projects they would normally litigate to stop. Yet, when copiously lubricated with the magic words “collaboration” or “climate change” most environmentalists can be enticed to swallow even the most ghastly of clearcuts in the most ecologically sensitive sites, such as the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana to the fast-dwindling ponderosa pine forests of Oregon's Blue Mountains.

One of Tidwell’s highest priorities will, it seems, be turn the national forests into industrial biomass farms, all in the name of green energy. Under this destructive scheme, forests, young and old alike, will be clearcut, not for lumber, but as fuel to be burned in biomass power generators. Already officials in the big timber states of Oregon and Washington are crowing that they will soon be able to become the “Saudi Arabia” of biomass production. Did they run this past Smokey the Bear?

Of course, Smokey, that global icon of wildfire suppression, and Tidwell will, no doubt, find common ground on another ecological dubious project: thinning and post-fire salvage logging. We’ve reached the point where old-fashioned timber sales are a thing of the past. Now every logging operation will an ecological justification — specious though they all certainly turn out to be.

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies, one of the few green outfits to consistently stand up against Democratic Party-sponsored depredations on the environment, sued Tidwell at least 20 times during his time as regional forester in Missoula. There’s no record of Tidwell being sued even once by Boise-Cascade, Plum Creek Timber or the Noranda Gold Mining Company.

Yet by and large, the mainstream environmental movement has muzzled itself while the Obama administration stocks the Interior Department with corporate lawyers, extraction-minded bureaucrats and Clinton-era retreads. This strategy of a self-imposed gag order will only serve to enable Salazar and Vilsak to pursue even more rapacious schemes without any fear of accountability.

The pattern of political conditioning has been honed to perfection. Every few weeks the Obama administration will drop a few meaningless crumbs--such as the reinstitution of the Clinton Roadless Area rule—toward the enviro establishment, which will greedily gobble them up one after the other until, like Hansel and Gretel with groupthink, they find themselves hopelessly lost in a vast maze of Obama-sanctioned clearcuts. After that, they won’t even get a crumb.

On the environment, the transition between Bush and Obama has been disturbingly smooth when it should have been decisively abrupt.

Where will the administration meet its first roadblock? Who will erect it?

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

To Pres. Obama: I Want My Money Back!


I Want My Money Back! (Pres. Obama!)

by Marie Marchand

I want my money back.

I gave $20 a week for seven months, plus $60 every once in a while for a t-shirt and sticker. I gave of my modest purse joyfully. Once I add that all up, it makes a grand total of... $106 billion?! Wait a minute, I thought I was supporting change I could believe in, not more of the same bloodshed and war!

Betrayal is a part of life. After awhile, you just come to expect it. Yet, the initial shock always hits you as a surprise. Alas, the nature of betrayal. Humans are vulnerable to being betrayed because underneath our husky shells, our pain and hardened hearts, we are soft and trustful creatures. We want to believe in people.

I'm not that young, so I possess some cynicism. But I'm not that old either, so I manage some idealism. Sure, I am used to being betrayed by my government. But I thought my days of calling the White House in tears were over. To think that Barack Obama preyed on this naive hope in me and millions like me is unforgivable.

I expect the Republicans to throw money at the Military Industrial Complex. Yet, from the Democrats, I was promised a different direction (like OUT of the Middle East). Regrettably, there has been miniscule change. There is still nothing to believe in.

It is against my religion to say the Pledge of Allegiance. (I am a Christian so I pledge allegiance only to God.) I did, however, pledge my time and treasure to Barack Obama. On November 4, 2008, I danced in the streets waving the American Flag, feeling proud to be an American. I was pathetically close to bustin' out some Toby Keith ditties.

It's not just the $106 billion that makes me feel betrayed. It's not just the fact that Gitmo probably won't be shut down after all. It is not even the president's assurance to Republicans that he will not release the photos of detainee abuse.

It is the rumors of intimidation and strong-arming that are, to me, the greatest betrayal.

That President Barack Obama sent Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi to bully anti-war Democrats into voting for the supplemental (and threatening to withdraw the leadership's support for their re-elections if they didn't) is a shameful misuse of power. Where's the humanity I once saw in Barack? It's just more of the same and I can't stomach it.

I knew I was naïve; yet like millions of Americans, I had no choice but to believe. Our hearts were desperate for hope. We saw Barack Obama as an oasis in the desert. To think that he may be just a mirage is heartbreaking.

When you have a minute, give Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold a call at (202) 224-5323. He was the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against the war funding (along with three Republicans and an Independent).

Oh, and please consider supporting my grassroots campaign to get my $680 back so I can donate it to the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center. Thanks.

Marie Marchand is executive director of the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center in Bellingham, WA.

Obama Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention


Published on Saturday, June 27, 2009 by ProPublica

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantanamo, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate suspected terrorists indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

[In this pool photo, reviewed by the U.S. military, and shot through glass, a guard watches over Guantanamo detainees inside the exercise yard at Camp 5 detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, on May 31, 2009. (Brennan Linsley/AFP/Getty Images)]In this pool photo, reviewed by the U.S. military, and shot through glass, a guard watches over Guantanamo detainees inside the exercise yard at Camp 5 detention facility at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, on May 31, 2009. (Brennan Linsley/AFP/Getty Images)
Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, White House officials are growing increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may prove impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the facility by the president's January 2010 deadline.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt did not directly respond to questions about an executive order but said the administration would address the cases of Guantanamo detainees in a manner "consistent with the national security interests of the United States and the interests of justice."

One administration official suggested the White House was already trying to build support for an executive order.

"Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order," the official said. Such an order can be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should either be prosecuted or released.

The Justice Department has declined comment on the prospects for a long-term detention system while internal reviews of Guantanamo detainees are underway. The reviews are expected to be completed by July 21.

In a May speech , President Obama broached the need for a system of long-term detention and suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. "We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the Executive Branch decide alone," the president said.

Some of Obama's top legal advisers, along with a handful of influential Republican and Democratic lawmakers, have pushed for the creation of a "national security court" to supervise the incarceration of detainees deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be charged or tried.

But the three senior government officials said the White House has turned away from that option, at least for now, because legislation establishing a special court would be both difficult to pass and likely to fracture Obama's own party. These officials, as well as others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.


On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. In his May speech, the president outlined five strategies the administration would use to deal with them: criminal trials, revamped military tribunals, transfers to other countries, releases and continued detention.

Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.

Administration officials said the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release. Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khaled Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The other half, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty because these detainees cannot be prosecuted either in federal court or military commissions. In many cases, the evidence against them is classified, has been provided by foreign intelligence services, or has been tainted by the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques.

Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with an assessment offered during congressional testimony this month that fewer than 25 percent of the detainees would be charged in criminal courts and that 50 others have been approved for transfer or release. One official said the administration is still hoping that as many as 70 Yemeni citizens will be moved, in stages, into a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia.

Three months into the Justice Department's reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees can not be charged or released.

The White House has spent months meeting with key congressional leaders in the hopes of reaching agreement on long-term detention, even as public support for such a plan has wavered as lawmakers have sought to prevent detainees from being transferred to their home states.

Lawyers for the administration are now in negotiations with Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over separate legislation that would revamp military commissions. A senior Republican staff member said that senators have yet to see "a comprehensive, detailed policy" on long-term detention from the administration.

"They can do it without congressional backing, but I think there would be very strong concerns," the staff member said, adding that "Congress could cut off funding" for any detention system established in the United States.

Concerns are growing among Obama's advisers that Congress may try to assert too much control over the process. Earlier this week, Obama signed an appropriations bill that forces the administration to report to Congress before moving any detainee out of Guantanamo and prevents the White House from using available funds to move detainees onto U.S. soil.

"Legislation could kill Obama's plans," said one government official involved. The official said an executive order could be the best option for the president at this juncture.

Under one White House draft that was being discussed earlier this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system. (Last month, ProPublica explored the key issues around preventive detention .)

Such detainees -- those at Guantanamo and those who may be captured in the future -- would also have the right to legal representation during confinement and access to some of the information that is being used to keep them behind bars. Anyone detained under this order would have a right to challenge his detention before a judge.

Officials argue that the plan would give detainees more rights and allow them a better chance to one day end their indefinite incarceration than they have now at Guantanamo.

But some senior Democrats see long-term detention as tantamount to reestablishing the Guantanamo system on U.S. soil. "I think this could be a very big mistake, because of how such a system could be perceived throughout the world," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told Holder.

One administration official said future transfers to the United States for long-term detention would be rare. Al-Qaida operatives captured on the battlefield, which the official defined as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and possibly the Horn of Africa, would be held in battlefield facilities. Suspects captured elsewhere in the world could be transferred to the United States for federal prosecution, turned over to local authorities, or returned to their home country.

"Going forward, unless it's an extraordinary case, you will not see new transfers to the U.S. for indefinite detention," the official said.

Instituting long-term detention through an executive order would leave Obama vulnerable to charges that he is willing to forsake the legislative branch of government, as his predecessor often did. Bush's detention policies suffered successive defeats in the courts in part because they lacked congressional approval and tried to exclude judicial oversight.

"There is no statute prohibiting the president from doing this through executive order and so far courts have not ruled in ways that would bar him from doing so," said Matthew Waxman, who worked on detainee issues at the Defense Department during Bush's first term. But Waxman, who waged an internal battle inside the Bush administration for more congressional cooperation, said the "courts are more likely to defer to the president and legislative branch when they speak with one voice on these issues."

Walid bin Attash, who is accused of involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and who was held at a secret CIA prison, could be among those subject to long-term detention, according to one senior official.

Little information on bin Attash's case has been made public, but officials who have reviewed his file said the Justice Department has concluded that none of the three witnesses against him can be brought to testify in court. One witness, who was jailed in Yemen, escaped several years ago. A second witness remains incarcerated, but the government of Yemen will not allow him to testify.

Administration officials believe that testimony from the only witness in U.S. custody, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, may be inadmissible because he was subjected to harsh interrogation while in CIA custody.

"These issues haven't morphed simply because the administration changed," said Juan Zarate, who served as Bush's deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"The challenge for the new administration is how to solve these legal question of preventive detention in a way that is consistent with the Constitution, legitimate in the eyes of the world and doesn't create security loopholes that causes Congress to worry," Zarate said.

Washington Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

OBAMA: USE IT OR LOSE IT !!!


Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats

by Theda Skocpol

Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point -- in the form of what happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health reform. A fork in the road socially, economically -- and politically. It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power to act, but will they use it -- or lose it?

If at this remarkable juncture Obama and the Democrats cannot enact a robust health care reform -- with a strong nationwide public option, cost controls, and nearly universal coverage -- I would not want to be in charge of fundraising and mobilization for them in the 2010 and 2012 elections! Most of us who supported them last time will of course not vote for a Republican.. But if Obama and the Democrats cannot act now on a once in a half century challenge and opportunity, they are not worthy of extra energy. And those of us who wrote big checks last time will tell the Democrats -- especially in the Senate -- to hold pharmaceutical fundraisers instead.

Key leaps forward for U.S. public social provision -- Social Security, Medicare, etc. -- have NEVER happened through "bipartisan" compromises and they always happen in close votes. They have always sqweaked through after gargantuan effort, strong presidential pressure, and refusal to allow eviscerating compromises. Think of Social Security if the Clark amendment -- allowing corporate opt-out -- had passed in 1935. We would not have it. And conservatives and the medical and insurance establishments cried "socialism" in 1965, too. We would not have Medicare if we had listened.

Obama and the Democrats are coming off a historic, landslide election. They have all the popular support for robust reform they will ever have. Good policy design as well public desire for change and considerations of social justice and economic efficiency insist that they enact health care reform with a strong public plan in the mix. That is the only way to move toward cost control and guaranteed access with quality to all -- especially for Americans in lower economic strata or in rural states where one or two private insurers call the tune. There is no need for "bipartisanship" and the calls for it from some weak-kneed Democrats are merely excuses for doing the business of the medical-insurance establishment. Senators Baucus, Conrad, Feinstein, Nelson, Landrieu, Bayh -- this means you. All of you come from states where people really need robust reform and you should step up.

The stakes here in political-economic terms are NOT between a "free market" and "government control." They are between two alternative uses of government regulations and subsidies: We will in America continue on the path set over the past thirty years: using government regulations and subsidies to distribute income and security upward, to guaranteed private profits; or will we redirect government interventions toward expanding popular security and leveling the economic playing field for various businesses? So-called conservatives seeking "compromise" on health care reform want more subsidies for their buddies' profits, and want to force more Americans to buy inefficient products (through a mandate to buy private insurance). If Obama and the Democrats agree to such compromises under the name of "reform" they will have squandered the country's future economically -- and undercut their own political fortunes for the future.

Because let's not kid ourselves: WHATEVER passes this year will make the Democrats owners of the health care mess going forward. If they just throw more subsidies and piecemeal regulations into the current system, they will ensure galloping public costs for residual arrangements and for subsidies to private insurers who will easily find ways to avoid sick or costly patients. Businesses and citizens will grow more and more irritated as time passes, and will blame the Democrats. Rightly so.

And to return to my theme at the start: no matter if Senate Democrats still think they are operating in the world of the 1980s or 1993, they are not. Activist Democrats -- mobilizers, volunteers, bloggers, analysts, and donors -- are watching them. We will know exactly who blocks or eviscerates real reform here. We WILL blame the Senate and the responsible individual Senators. And many of us will blame the Obama adminsitration if it does not take a strong stand on the public option and real reform, starting right now. Whatever he says in public, Obama needs to draw lines in the sand with Democrats in private -- and get tough. If he does not, and this fizzles into no legislation or reform in appeance only, energy will dissipate from the Demorats and the Obama movement. There will be the wrong kind of turning point for them -- and for America.

So step up now, Obama and the Democratic Party. Your moment is here and now.

Obama Adminstration is Helping to Upgrade Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons


A CounterPunch Exclusive Report

The Obama Adminstration is Helping to Upgrade Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons

How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

By ANDREW COCKBURN

"If the worst, the unthinkable, were to happen,” Hillary Clinton recently told Fox News, “and this advancing Taliban encouraged and supported by Al Qaeda and other extremists were to essentially topple the government … then they would have keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.” Many will note that the extremists posing this unthinkable prospect were set up in business by the U.S. in the first place. Very well buried is the fact that the nuclear arsenal that must not be allowed to fall into the hands of our former allies has been itself the object of U.S. encouragement over the years and is to this very day in receipt of crucial U.S. financial assistance and technical support.

Back in 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski, intent on his own jihad against the USSR, declared that the “Afghan resistance” should be supplied with money and arms. That, of course, required full Pakistani cooperation, which would, Brzezinski underlined, “require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” In other words, Pakistan was free to get on with building a bomb so long as we could arm the people who have subsequently come back to haunt us. Asked for his views on Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, Ronald Reagan replied “I just don’t think it’s any of our business.” During the years that the infamous A.Q. Khan was peddling his uranium enrichment technology around the place, his shipping manager was a CIA agent, whose masters seem to have had little problem with allowing the trade to go forward.

Now comes word from inside the Obama government that little has changed. “Most of the aid we’ve sent them over the past few years has been diverted into their nuclear program,” a senior national security official in the current administration recently told me. Most of this diverted aid -- $5.56 billion as of a year ago – was officially designated “Coalition Support Funds” for Pakistani military operations against the Taliban. It may be that this diversion came as a terrible shock to Washington, but the money has been routinely handed over essentially without accounting being required from the Pakistanis. The GAO has huffed at items such as the $30 million shelled out for non-existent roads, of the $1.5 million for “naval vehicles damaged in combat” but that was as far as public complaints went. In the meantime, as Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mullen confirmed recently, the Pakistanis have been urgently increasing their nuclear weapons production.

A former national security official with knowledge of the policy explained this insouciance to me. “We want to get in there and manage [their nuclear program]. If we manage it, we can make sure they don’t start testing, or start a war.” In other words, the U.S. is helping the Pakistanis to modernize their nuclear arsenal in hopes that the U.S. will thereby gain a measure of control. The official aim of U.S. technical support, at an estimated cost of $100 million a year, is to render the Pakistani weapons safer, i.e., less likely to go off if dropped, and more “secure”, meaning out of the reach of our old friends the extremists.

However, in pursuit of this objective, it is inevitable that the U.S. is not only rendering the warheads more operationally reliable, we are also transferring the technology required to design more sophisticated warheads without having to test them, a system known as “stockpile stewardship.”

Conceived after the U.S. forswore live testing in 1993 as a means to “test” weapons through computer simulations, this vastly expensive program not only ensures the weapons’ reliability (at least in theory) but also the viability of new and improved designs. In reality, the stewardship program has been as much a boondoggle for the politically powerful nuclear laboratories at Livermore and Los Alamos as anything else, so outreach in the form of assistance to the Pakistanis in this area can only gratify our own weaponeers.

“If you’re not confident that weapons are safe to handle, you’re more likely to keep them in the basement,” says nuclear command and control expert Bruce Blair, President of the World Security Institute. “The military is always pressuring to deploy the weapons, which requires an increase in readiness.” In 2008 Blair himself was approached by the Pakistani military seeking advice on means to render their weapons more secure. Their aim, he says, was clearly to render their nuclear force “mature,” and “operational.” In the same way, says Blair, a few years ago an Indian military delegation turned up at the Russian Impulse Design Bureau in St. Petersburg, to ask for help on making their weapons safer to handle. “They said they wanted to be able to assure their political leadership that their weapons were safe enough to be deployed.”

Pakistan’s drive to build more nukes is an inevitable by-product of the 2008 nuclear cooperation deal with India that overturned U.S. law and gave the Indians access to US nuclear technology, not to mention massive arms sales, despite their ongoing bomb program.

The deal blew an enormous hole in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but initial protests from congressional doves were soon smothered under human-wave assaults by arms company and nuclear industry lobbyists. The Israelis lent additional and potent assistance on Capital Hill. Not coincidentally, Israeli arms dealers, promised a significant slice of the action, have garnered at least $1.5 billion worth of orders from Delhi. (The respected Israeli daily Haaretz has highlighted Indian media reports that the bribes involved totaled $120 million.) Nuclear power’s handmaiden, the global warming lobby, was also a wellspring of ardent support, led by Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railroad engineer who is Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shared Al Gore’s Nobel prize.) Even the Dalai Lama was drafted in to use his influence with impressionable members of congress.

The consequent success in overturning a longstanding arms control treaty, which in turn has led to the U.S. extending a helping hand to India’s nuclear rivals in Pakistan, should only be seen as the wave of the future. Instead of foaming at the Iranian nuclear program, we should be standing at the ready to oversee their design of safer, more reliable nukes, and after that, who knows? North Korea’s bomb probably need work too.

Andrew Cockburn writes about national security and related matters. His most recent book is Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy. He is the co-producer of American Casino, the feature documentary on the ongoing financial collapse. He can be reached at amcockburn@gmail.com.

Robust Health Care Reform is the Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats


Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats

by Theda Skocpol

Fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats and Obama supporters, we are at a moment of truth, a pivotal turning point -- in the form of what happens in the next days and weeks with robust, universal health reform. A fork in the road socially, economically -- and politically. It could go either way depending on Obama and the Democratic officeholders many of us worked so hard to elect. They have the power to act, but will they use it -- or lose it?

If at this remarkable juncture Obama and the Democrats cannot enact a robust health care reform -- with a strong nationwide public option, cost controls, and nearly universal coverage -- I would not want to be in charge of fundraising and mobilization for them in the 2010 and 2012 elections! Most of us who supported them last time will of course not vote for a Republican.. But if Obama and the Democrats cannot act now on a once in a half century challenge and opportunity, they are not worthy of extra energy. And those of us who wrote big checks last time will tell the Democrats -- especially in the Senate -- to hold pharmaceutical fundraisers instead.

Key leaps forward for U.S. public social provision -- Social Security, Medicare, etc. -- have NEVER happened through "bipartisan" compromises and they always happen in close votes. They have always sqweaked through after gargantuan effort, strong presidential pressure, and refusal to allow eviscerating compromises. Think of Social Security if the Clark amendment -- allowing corporate opt-out -- had passed in 1935. We would not have it. And conservatives and the medical and insurance establishments cried "socialism" in 1965, too. We would not have Medicare if we had listened.

Obama and the Democrats are coming off a historic, landslide election. They have all the popular support for robust reform they will ever have. Good policy design as well public desire for change and considerations of social justice and economic efficiency insist that they enact health care reform with a strong public plan in the mix. That is the only way to move toward cost control and guaranteed access with quality to all -- especially for Americans in lower economic strata or in rural states where one or two private insurers call the tune. There is no need for "bipartisanship" and the calls for it from some weak-kneed Democrats are merely excuses for doing the business of the medical-insurance establishment. Senators Baucus, Conrad, Feinstein, Nelson, Landrieu, Bayh -- this means you. All of you come from states where people really need robust reform and you should step up.

The stakes here in political-economic terms are NOT between a "free market" and "government control." They are between two alternative uses of government regulations and subsidies: We will in America continue on the path set over the past thirty years: using government regulations and subsidies to distribute income and security upward, to guaranteed private profits; or will we redirect government interventions toward expanding popular security and leveling the economic playing field for various businesses? So-called conservatives seeking "compromise" on health care reform want more subsidies for their buddies' profits, and want to force more Americans to buy inefficient products (through a mandate to buy private insurance). If Obama and the Democrats agree to such compromises under the name of "reform" they will have squandered the country's future economically -- and undercut their own political fortunes for the future.

Because let's not kid ourselves: WHATEVER passes this year will make the Democrats owners of the health care mess going forward. If they just throw more subsidies and piecemeal regulations into the current system, they will ensure galloping public costs for residual arrangements and for subsidies to private insurers who will easily find ways to avoid sick or costly patients. Businesses and citizens will grow more and more irritated as time passes, and will blame the Democrats. Rightly so.

And to return to my theme at the start: no matter if Senate Democrats still think they are operating in the world of the 1980s or 1993, they are not. Activist Democrats -- mobilizers, volunteers, bloggers, analysts, and donors -- are watching them. We will know exactly who blocks or eviscerates real reform here. We WILL blame the Senate and the responsible individual Senators. And many of us will blame the Obama adminsitration if it does not take a strong stand on the public option and real reform, starting right now. Whatever he says in public, Obama needs to draw lines in the sand with Democrats in private -- and get tough. If he does not, and this fizzles into no legislation or reform in appeance only, energy will dissipate from the Demorats and the Obama movement. There will be the wrong kind of turning point for them -- and for America.

So step up now, Obama and the Democratic Party. Your moment is here and now.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

OBAMA IS A VERY SMOOTH LIAR


Obama a Very Smooth Liar

by John R. MacArthur

It isn't quite fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to take back later. For now, I won’t quibble with The St. Petersburg Times’s Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises and breaking only six.

And yet, broadly speaking, Obama has been lying on a pretty impressive scale. You just have to get past his grandiloquent rhetoric — usually empty of substance — to get a handle on it. I offer a short, incomplete list, which I’m sure others could easily enlarge.

  • Obama portrayed himself as the peace candidate, or at least the anti-war candidate. He is not a peace president, nor is he stopping any wars. True, he promised military escalation in Afghanistan (to blunt John McCain’s accusations of wimpishness), but well-meaning folks believed their new hero would genuinely move to end the occupation of Iraq and seriously try to negotiate with the Taliban. Instead, he has not only increased the number of troops and attacks against the Afghan insurgency, he has also expanded on George Bush’s cross-border raids into Pakistan, which have killed many civilians. The way things are going, Pakistan could become the new Cambodia and Obama the new Nixon.

    In Iraq, Obama has promised to withdraw all the troops . . . unless, which means that we’re not leaving. Whether it’s 50,000 troops remaining at the “invitation” of the so-called government of Iraq, or just enough to man the 14 permanent military bases, or some combination of U.S. military personnel and private mercenaries that exceeds 50,000 soldiers, our army will almost certainly stay in Iraq past the stated deadline of Jan. 1, 2012.


  • Obama said he wanted to reform Washington and “fix” its “broken” system of corrupt lobbying. But Obama is neither a reformer nor a skilled legislative mechanic. Hatched from the Daley Machine in one-party Chicago, Obama wouldn’t be president today if he rocked boats. Witness the appointment of Roland Burris by the corrupt former Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill Obama’s Senate seat: not a word of public protest from the new administration because Burris is a made man in the Chicago Democratic organization. So what if “Tombstone Roland” can be heard on the U.S. attorney’s wiretaps of Blagojevich, dancing around the delicate question of how to raise money for Blago without appearing to be buying his seat.

    As for pork-barrel politics, Obama named one of its greatest champions, Chicago’s own Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff, and the new budget (as well as the “stimulus” package) is loaded with pork. Meanwhile, have you heard anything serious about campaign-finance reform from Obama? Not very likely from someone who refused public financing and still has about $10 million left over from record receipts of $745.7 million. It’s just a detail, I know, but Obama’s naming of former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn III as deputy secretary of defense seems to be at odds with the president’s alleged crusade against special interests and the “revolving door” between private business and government. He has also “sold” ambassadorships to campaign donors. The biggest plum, London, is slated for Lou Susman, a Chicagoan and former Citigroup executive who bundled $239,000. Paris has been reserved for Charles Rivkin, who raised about $500,000 for Obama.


  • Obama, with his Arabic middle name and his big Cairo speech, wants people to think that he is the Muslim world’s new best friend. Well, the photograph of a cheery Obama with Saudi King Abdullah and a smiling Emanuel with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, proves the contrary. The Saudi royal family hates the idea of representative government for ordinary Muslims and is cruelly indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. A democratic, independent, partly secular Palestine could only make the Saudi oligarchy look bad. Thus, the House of Saud is perfectly happy with the status quo, and so, evidently, is Obama.

    Without Saudi pressure, there will be no resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Saudi oil is the only lever that would cause America to press Israel into making real concessions. Indeed, the president doesn’t mean for one minute to force Israel into anything more than symbolic withdrawals of its illegal settlements on the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Saudi elite continues to play its double game, paying protection money to extremist Islam and granting pensions to the relatives of suicide bombers. It’s just politics, say Barack and Rahm, grinning ear-to-ear with their sleazy new friends from Riyahd. Just keep the oil pumping around election time and all will be well.


  • Obama makes like he’s a friend of organized labor, at least he did during the Ohio primary when he needed to beat Hillary Clinton. At the time, he put out a flier headlined “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals” and charged that “a little more than a year ago, Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was a ‘boon’ to the economy.” In a debate with Clinton on Feb. 26, 2008, he said, “I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA] in the same way that Senator Clinton talked about” and “use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage” to get “labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”

    But two months ago, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk said such a blunt instrument was no longer necessary and that the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were now “of the mind that we should be looking for opportunities to strengthen [the North American Free Trade Agreement].” And, of course, there is no discussion at all about renegotiating Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, a “bad trade deal” that has done even greater harm to American workers and unions than has NAFTA.

Meanwhile, as I noted in my April 15 column, “Wall Street sharks circle the UAW,” Obama and his banker friend Steven Rattner are liquidating the United Auto Workers even as they liquidate the American auto industry. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s pseudo-secretary of labor, said as much. “The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bailout is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise,” he wrote last month in the Financial Times — no surprise, considering that Obama’s chief economic adviser remains Lawrence Summers, a champion of deregulation and “free-market” economics in the Clinton administration and very much the enemy of labor unions.

Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.

John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine. Among other books, he is the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.

Single-payer is a bridge too far for President Barack Obama.


Obama Running Scared

by Helen Thomas

A universal health care system based on the single-payer model appears to be a bridge too far for President Barack Obama.

A single-payer system, such as Medicare for everyone, would provide health care for all.

President Lyndon Johnson had the courage to weigh in with all his clout to win passage of Medicare and Medicaid.

President Roosevelt put all his chips on the table to win passage of the Social Security Act that makes the elderly more secure.

All around the world, governments have long made medical care available for their citizens. Why not us?

Obama clearly has no stomach for the political battle that any single-payer plan would ignite. So he's endorsed a step that would allow the government to provide health insurance coverage -- not health care -- to eligible people. Such government-sponsored health insurance is being considered in Congress as it writes health care reform legislation.

While the public plan option gets full consideration in Congress, the single-payer model has been unwelcome at the White House or on Capitol Hill.

Obama said part of the fierce opposition to health care reform has been fueled "by some interest groups and lobbyists -- opposition that has used fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to, yes, socialize medicine."

He made it clear that his idea of health care reform would allow patients to choose their own doctors and keep their own health plans.

Somehow government bailouts have been more palatable for Wall Street plutocrats who happen to be needy.

Obama stressed in a speech to the AMA in Chicago last week that he does not favor socialized medicine.

Some 47 million Americans are uninsured -- many because some employers have dropped coverage in the economic downturn. Others lack insurance because pre-existing illnesses deny them access to private insurance. There also are millions with no way to pay for soaring health insurance payments because they have lost their jobs.

Nearly all Republicans and some moderate Democrats oppose any public plan option. These are the same lawmakers who receive many government-provided perks including health insurance.

In his remarks to the AMA, Obama warned against "scare tactics" and "fear mongering" by opponents of the public plan option, which the President said should be available to those who have no health insurance.

Obama rejected the "illegitimate concern that's being put forward by those who are claiming that a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system."

Obama should tear a page out of LBJ's vote-getting manual and shame the heartless opponents.

The health of all Americans is our business.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Among other books she is the author of Front Row at The White House: My Life and Times.

OBAMA'S CLASSROOM SPIES


"America's Best Political Newsletter"
counterpunch
edited by alexander cockburn and jeffrey st.clair

Son of PRISP

Obama's Classroom Spies

By DAVID PRICE

As the continuities and disjunctures between the Bush and Obama administrations come into focus it becomes increasingly clear that while Obama’s domestic agenda has some identifiable breaks with Bush’s, at its core, the new administration remains committed to staying the course of American militarization. Now we have an articulate, nuanced president who supports elements of progressive domestic policies, can even comfortably say the phrase LGBT in public speeches, while funding military programs at alarming levels and continuing the Bush administration’s military and intelligence invasion of what used to be civilian life.

The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a “Reserve Officers' Training Corps” to train unidentified future intelligence officers in US college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students—in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.

Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor’s offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns—an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.

It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors.

While the National Intelligence Director’s move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. That some administrators would so easily accommodate themselves and their institutional integrity for the promise of funds should be of little surprise, but I fear that the combined forces of the current economic collapse conjoined with President Obama’s ability to bring a new liberal credibility to the this warmed-over Bush era project will induce many faculty and students to seriously consider participating in these programs. Times are hard and as funds get scarce it will be increasingly difficult for many to say no.

This development is just the latest installment in on ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. None of this should be surprising in a nation that alone spends about 48% of the planet’s military budget. In the social sciences, these shifts away from broad funding sources designed to create independent knowledgeable scholars, to those now requiring indentured servitude has been a long time coming.

Back in the early 1990s when the National Security Education Program (NSEP) was first introduced it was widely condemned by professional associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association for blurring the lines between independent scholarship raised by NSEP’s its requirements that program participants later seek employment in governmental agencies. But with the depressed economy, plummeting endowment funds at universities and foundations, the difficult academic job market, and scarce academic funding sources, I fear that professional associations’ reactions against these developments will be muted. As pilot programs, PRISP and the Intelligence Community Scholars Programs made scarce funds available to students, as traditional non-payback funding programs were being cut. Programs like PRISP that seek to tie young scholars to agencies like CIA early in their career as a means of bringing new ideas and skills to these agencies will fail in meeting the claimed goal of getting these agencies to think in new ways because such ties to institutional culture early in student-agent careers will increase the influence of agency cultural groupthink while diminishing the impact of academic culture. If the Obama administration really wants to improve governmental agencies’ knowledge of and approaches to the world, they need to increase funding to a broad range of educational funding programs that do not encumber or limit the range of knowledge in the ways that programs like PRISP do.

This move to establish PRISP as a permanent budgetary item is the sort of program that likely will speed through congress—which can then claim it is both supporting education funding, and military and intelligence sectors, with a bonus feel-good work-ethic mandate thrown-in by requiring students to payback their funds through required future governmental service. But this push will be done without an outside assessment of PRISP as pilot program. PRISP needs an independent assessment of what it has accomplished—including an assessment of the impact of the predatory penalties facing former PRISP students who come to realize that they do not wish to fulfill their commitments to work for these agencies upon graduation. Because of the lack of transparency surrounding PRISP, we have little idea what is really going on with the program. Last year I was able to identify one social science recipient of PRISP funds who explained to me that PRISP had been such a failure in finding social scientists to fund that PRISP had sought out this person and provided them with funds for work that was already underway just to spend-down the PRISP budget. Given these recent difficulties with the program, I wonder if the current expansion of PRISP is a supply-side effort to troll the pool of increasingly underfunded and debt-carrying desperate young scholars with few other funding options.

Professional associations like the American Association of University Professors, the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association need to speak out in opposition of the permanent establishment of PRISP. PRISP risks further blurring already hazy borders marking proper independent academic roles, and it stands to confuse academic identities in ways that many will not even realize. Some of these processes are reminiscent of a recurrent motif in Philip K. Dick’s stories where protagonists becomes unclear of their own agency and identity; becoming unsure of their own histories and memories, or true political alliances—in effect becoming undercover agents with identities unknown even to themselves. As this new generation of programs covertly brings undeclared and unidentifiable students into our universities they disrupt university identities and transforms the roles all who teach, research, study and work there in ways that they will not necessarily understand—as institutions of higher learning further lose their independence and become unwitting agents of state intelligence functions.

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ forthcoming Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published later this month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu